First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.
Not usually one for the visual assignments, I saw Jeff McClucken’s effort to capture the essence of his new band, Swiss Emigration to Russia, and succinct breakdown of how to create the album cover and went through the brief process of creating a band and finding an image.
After being introduced to the Dactyloceras lucina – a species of moth of the Brahmaeidae family found in central and west Africa – I went a little further with the image search, consulting Flickr’s the Commons under the search tag for Interesting and found my base layer, which I then uploaded into pixlr.com, an online photo editor that let me add text and diffuse the picture to give it the grainy/painting effect.
Other than not creating a square image – as I believe is one of the requirements – I also think I could have done a better job capturing the essence of my randomly generated quotation, which I’ll share in full here as a fond greeting to my camp and bunkmates, but also an acknowledgment of Camp Macguffin’s initial honeymoon period (I mean, not in Bunk X, but for the other campers):
The only thing that lasts longer than a friend’s love is the stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better. Randy K. Milholland
I’m tangled up in the Milholland quote.
Resting with it. …
In the mean time, I can’t wait to hear the tracks on Dactyloceras Lucina’s latest album, “From Knowing Any Better.”
I dig the warmth of the colors and texture – well matched. I like how the text squeezes into the sky space, as well.
What kind of sound do you imagine the band has?
Best, C
I’m looking forward to our first recording/jam session, definitely! There are a few tricks in the Nicecast broadcasting mixer that I think would lend themselves to some atmospheric instrumental music: stay tuned.
As for the sound, Alan passed us off as ‘goth soul,’ and I may try to make that work, but I’m sensing something more Explosions in the Sky, or even some sort of desert space-rock like Josh Homme used to make.
Percolating…
I think by “goth soul” Alan meant rhythmic Emo-noise, basically just like Explosions in the Sky-in my mind’s ear-landscape rock.
Totally. Goth Soul it is.
All I can think of is how devoted the fans must be to figure out how to pronounce the band’s name. 🙂
Nice job, though. I love the understatedness of the words. It would be interesting to play around with Photoshop to pull the seated figure out a bit on the background.
It could be a little like misinterpreting Smiths lyrics: however you say it is right ; )
And yeah – I think the figure could be a little more defined, but my Photoshop skills are somewhere in that big blurry mess, waiting to be pulled out, too…
Martha, devoted fans all know to call them DactL